The newly appointed Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Aminu Maida, said on Tuesday that he would align the Commission’s regulatory focus to achieve President Bola Tinubu’s agenda to advance the nation’s digital transformation drive.
Maida, who made this pledge during his meeting with the Senior Management team of the Commission at the Commission’s Head Office in Abuja, said there was the need to ensure that the NCC strategically focused on ensuring that all Nigerians have access to affordable and reliable broadband services.
According to him, part of this need is to ensure “effective broadband infrastructure diffusion across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
The newly appointed telecom regulator commended the past chief executives of the Commission for their laudable role in building a resilient telecoms industry, hinting that the pursuit of improved quality of service on the networks as well as supporting the vision of the government and the Ministry will be his key priorities.
He expatiated: “Considering the fact that many people are going more digital and virtual in everything they do, the telecom infrastructure is now under much stress. President Tinubu’s vision emphasizes the need to build more robust broadband connectivity that will not only facilitate seamless digital transactions but also serve as the bedrock for e-governance and other socio-economic initiatives.
“As such, we would align with this aspiration to increase broadband penetration to 70 per cent and to cover 90 per cent of the population by 2025. Therefore, we need to build a reliable telecom industry with impressive quality of service (QoS) indicators with quality of experience (QoE) as our watchword and ultimate goal. This also requires us to address a number of issues such as the Right of Way (RoW) challenge, ensuring security of our telecom infrastructure, among others. Efforts must be made to significantly improve service delivery by ensuring the NCC is performance-driven.
“Mr President has a very clear agenda from which all of us are going to take our direction. The two major areas are job creation and enabling the digital economy. Where we are going in a nutshell is; everything that we do in this Commission has to align directly with the Strategic Plan of the Hon. Minister of Communications, Innovations and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, and ultimately to the Renewed Hope agenda of His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. We would not deviate from that.
“We would not entertain anything that deviates from this direction because my key performance indicators (KPIs) are fed into the Minister’s KPIs and the President KPIs come from the electorate that put him into power. The Hon. Minister has said clearly that he is ready to build a robust digital infrastructure and empower three million Nigerians digitally and we have to do our best to support him in this regard”, Maida added.
He further explained that, in the Strategic Plan of the Minister, there was a plan to empower three million Nigerians in digital skills and entrepreneurship, adding that this will require the Commission to support Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) as a digital training institution, to be well positioned in driving the government’s agenda on youth empowerment.
The EVC also harped on the importance of effective spectrum management and utilization in supporting the envisioned digital connectivity agenda, which is critical to service deployment to the generality of Nigerians and businesses in the country.
Maida, while commending his predecessors and staff of the Commission for their roles in digital transformation of all sectors by stimulating the deployment of baseline telecom infrastructure, however, called on the staff to join his leadership with a sense of purpose as a team towards advancing the actualisation of the digital economy agenda aimed at achieving sustainable development and quality of life for all citizens.
